(7 of 10)
At a time when the overwhelming sentiment in the U.S. was isolationist, Luce was an interventionist. His magazines sought to awaken the American people to external danger and their new world responsibility. TIME in the later '30s made clear that it thought Hitler and the Nazis a menace. When the Germans attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, it came forth with a new section called "World War," and boldly led it off with the flat statement: "World War II began last week." Readers protested that it was no such thing, but TIME stuck by its new phrase; the phrase stuck, too. FORTUNE allowed Wendell Willkie to articulate his philosophy in its pages, thus helped bring him into the national arena and win the 1940 G.O.P. nomination. When the Germans attacked Belgium in May of that year, the Luces were staying at the American embassy in Brussels. They were awakened by a maid rushing in shouting "Les Allemands!" and reached the window just in time to see a bomb fall on a house across the square below.
In February of 1941—well before Pearl Harbor—Luce published his famous article on The American Century, urging full entry into the war. He prophesied that the U.S. would enter the war eventually, win it, and thereafter assume worldwide responsibilities, including the supplying of vast quantities of food to millions of hungry people around the world. When the U.S. was forced to go to war only a few months later, Time Inc. sent correspondents to the battlefields. TIME got a new dimension from the original war reporting of such men as Robert Sherrod, Charles Wertenbaker, Theodore H. White, Noel Busch and John Hersey. Both TIME and LIFE began following U.S. troops and civilians abroad with a number of special lightweight "pony" airmail editions.
Eye on the Future. Luce made several trips abroad, visited the war fronts as often as he was permitted to. On one such trip, as he later described it, "I was standing in front of a fireplace with Winston Churchill. Earlier we had seen a movie, Custer's Last Stand, which put the old man in a good mood, and I got him to treat me to a personal account of the Battle of Omdurman. When Omdurman was done, I veered to the question of 'postwar planning.' The next thing I felt was a hearty slap on the back and Churchill saying: 'Never mind about all that, Luce. Just win the war—and then all will be well.' "
Nonetheless, Luce and his publications kept their eye on the future as the battles were being waged. Time Inc. formed a War Committee to decide what it would do journalistically after the war and how to prepare for it. In several prescient statements, Luce advocated "the end of imperialism throughout the world" and suggested the formation of a United States of Europe. He told his editors in a memo: "The interrelationship between Asia and the West is the greatest new factor in human life." Well before the war ended, both TIME and LIFE were warning their readers that the Russians were not to be trusted.